In the 1830’s and 1840’s, African Americans lived on Little Water Street in a cluster of tenements know as “Cow Bay:”
Cow Bay was located in an area known as “The Five Points.” The tenement buildings were old, decrepit, and marred by filth, prostitutes, and thieves. They were considered to be the worst in all of Five Points. Many journalists went so far as to call Five Points “the very lowest and worst place in New York.”1
However, African Americans began to move out of the Lower East Side in the mid 1850’s. A study of the 1855 New York State census revealed that out of 1,333 individuals residing in one part of Five Points, only 3 were black. 2
African Americans who did choose to live in the Lower East Side in the 19th century were subjected to severe cases of racial segregation. The Cow Bay tenements were almost exclusively African American before they left in the 1850’s. Furthermore, several of the houses on Park Street were small boardinghouses in which only blacks resided. It is therefore evident that a combination of inferior treatment and inferior tenements drove African Americans out of Five Points and in search of better housing and better lives.3
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1. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points (New York: Penguin Group, 2002), 91
2. Fritz Umbach, “Census Project for the Five Points,” American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, (2003-2006), http://fivepoints.ashp.cuny.edu/search.php
3. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points, 97
